Pages

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Spaceships: Start of a Fleet & the LPL Round 4

The blog has been too busy with the A-Z to get around to posting my entry from Round 4 of the Lead Painter's League, but thought I'd squeeze them in today.

This is a small sample of the very large fleet of spaceships I have been hoping to get a chance to paint for a few years. They are from Ground Zero Games, the NSL fleet.

The LPL rounds only require a team to be five minis, but it can be more, and I wanted what would look like a decent spread of ships for a small defense force.

This was my entry. I won my round by a large margin, and have been climbing up the ranks each week, from an entry at about 15, to 9, to 6 and currently in 3rd position. Nice, though I know it can't last. I was hesitant about entering spaceships, since smaller scale minis don't seem to do as well in the LPL. But I want to paint what I want, and the whole point of doing this was to get a bit of progress on some of my favorite projects that have gone neglected in the proverbial lead mountain.

I got these ships with the idea that they'd be generic enough to play in any spaceship game. Full Thrust is possible as is Firestorm Armada. I have enough ships to mimic a Firestorm Armada fleet construction style, but I like these ships a lot better than FA ships. While some of the FA ships I like a lot, the thing I'm not so crazy about is the size of the capitol ships. The Battleships & Carriers are just massive, and they now have ships that dwarf those!. The escort & cruiser sizes are alright, but the big ships are just physically too big. Scale Creep hit the stars in a big way. It's like 40k: the tanks and flyers might look nice, but trying to put a lot of them on a 4x6 table looks wrong. It's like trying to put a few guinea pigs in your hamster habitrail cage. I will hold off on any Spartan Games ships- still waiting on the rumor that they may make a 'fleet action' scale available, where they have all the ships they have now, but done in a smaller scale. Sign me up for that!

I think the GZG ships are excellent spaceship minis in design. They look 'authentic' to me. Simple, practical and sturdy. I wanted a 'grey-white' look to them, taking inspiration from Imperial Star Destroyers and Battlestar Galactica. I don't think visuals would count for much in space. You'd have sensor findings on enemy ships long before any visual sightings would be possible. Painted markings on ships is very unlikely: there's just no point. So to match the 'no-nonsense' design I wanted a 'no-nonsense' paintjob for them. I'm happy with the results.

Close-ups that weren't possible in the LPL 800pixel limits (click for larger):

7
comments:

They look even better in closeup - you well deserved to win by that margin (happy to have been part of it!). And you absolutely should paint what you want to, not whats popular.

I have Always been sucker for space games, from fighter skirmishes (like Silent Death) up to fleet combat with FT, Leviathan and a myriad of others. I always wanted to get into Star Blazers too: loved the show as a kid and the anime style ships are very different to the usual 'hard sf' style.